Kunama 1961

White Australia Policy

What are you earning? What do you eat? Where do you live? To ever question you will answer satisfactorily. Why do you have these things? Because you are a White Australian.

Yet in this very country of high living standards, we have people without even the basic essentials for an adequate life. Most natives are not accepted by White communities in Australia - we find them lazy, dirty, uncivilized - and black! And we criticise the U.S.A.!

Few real chances for education are possible for aborigines. True we allow them schooling, but their homes make real progress impossible. We do not train them to understand complex Western patterns of life - just expect them to gain them while confined to barren areas of Australia or in isolated settlements on the, outskirts of towns.

But you say we in N.S.W. spend £265,613 on 13,598 aborigines in 1960. To educate and house them we each spent fourpence! You don't hate them? You feel sorry for them? I don't believe you. For if you did you would do something to alleviate our growing Colour problem.

CLAIRE PEADON, 5th Year

An experience I had has left me guilty even today. It was a hot day and the sun beat down as we approached a small dirty outback town. There were no gardens, the soil was only pale yellow sand. Even the people, thin and brown suited the town.

Thin, with torn battered clothes they stood outside their houses. These were made of any material - wood or tin, with missing doors and windows, only pieces of rag or hessian bags. These homes would only last a year or two. As they looked at us with our modern car and expensive equipment, I felt full of sympathy for them, yet guilty too, because these people owned Australia, till we White people took it from them.